Gallagher: Romney Not Anti-Gay Enough

Let the immediate political post-mortem begin and let’s start with arch-bigot Maggie Gallagher, who says that Romney lost because he just wasn’t anti-gay and anti-abortion enough. Because the problem is that he just didn’t pander enough to bigots like her.

Meanwhile the GOP elites’ tactical decision to ignore social issues totally is not helping. The major Romney super PACs are “truce” PACs, refusing to run any social-issue ads at all — except the one saying Romney actually supports abortion in some cases. Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina — these are all states where, if voters learned how extreme President Obama is on abortion and gay marriage, it would help Romney.

Social conservatives are absent from this election. Their money isn’t being used in any visible way to organize voters. If Romney loses, this will be part of the reason why…

Christian conservatives who care about life, marriage, and religious liberty need to create effective political vehicles for demonstrating and acting on this concern. Or we are going to wake up like Europe with no political vehicle for a voice.

I think you’re absolutely right. You should start your own party focused just on those issues.

Sorry, Maggie, but I know and work with a LOT of “social conservatives” and every last one of them very eagerly voted for Romney last Tuesday. The local teabagger organizations were also out in force Tuesday morning with a strong get-out-the-vote effort for the white…er, I mean, Romney.

To say that social conservatives were going to be absent from last Tuesday’s election is beyond absurd. But by all means, Maggie, keep telling yourself that.

Because the real anti-gay bigots and anti-abortion fanatics did so swimmingly well.

Trebuchet

The “not bigoted conservative enough” mantra is being repeated by wingnuts coast to coast, leaving the Repubs with a serious problem. The party is currently trifurcated between the big money faction, the tea party/Christian right faction, and the libertarian faction, none of which represent most ordinary middle-class voters. The big-money folks are still in charge, hence the nomination of Romney, but having nurtured the others are finding them increasingly difficult to control. That’s directly caused them to fail twice in a row to gain control of the senate by nominating crackpots for seats they’d have had a good chance of winning. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out the next few years.

Maggie and the other haters had no place to go except Romney, so we can add stupidity (unsurprisingly) to her many sterling qualities, because her Romney vote didn’t count any less because she was holding her nose when she cast it. Does she think the bigots voted for Romney with insufficient enthusiasm? They had all the enthusiasm they needed because they would “crawl over broken glass” to vote against the man in the White House. Their problem was that their candidate was not nearly the slick manager he claimed to be. Romney was out-organized and out-maneuvered and Obama drew in the non-crazy voters that made the difference. Maggie and her ilk were in Romney’s pocket all along, so further pandering to them would have been ridiculous.

glodson

Oh please, please, please, please let them listen to your advice and start their own party. I want to see them get curbstomped in an election and have to explain why it failed. hat would be…. that would just make my day.

[Maggie Gallagher] should start your own party focused just on those issues.

There remain two extant wings of the Republican party with power, conservative Christians and plutocrats within certain business sectors. They need each other; the plutocrats for the votes and conservative Christians for the money needed to run campaigns. Here’s an article on how an evangelical political leader, David Lane, is reacting to last Tuesday’s beat-down where it’s his perspective that the plutocrats failed the voting base.

Since neither wing has any desire to improve by adaptation, the plutocratic wing seems to be lobbying within the party to recruit a new group of theologically conservative populists, Hispanics. There are other groups but they have no real power. The challenge for the GOP plutocrats here is the inherent racism and bigotry conservative Christians in the U.S. have towards the brown hoards. The plus for conservative Christians would be they could continue to maintain their bigotry towards other groups and not retreat on social issues like their hatred of experts, secularists, women, gays and their families, and people with brown skin other than Hispanics; along with their denialism on issues like climate change, evolution, and the efficacy of education.

MikeMa

Poor Maggie. No grasp of any reality at all. The anti-abortion candidates where whupped. Many baggers lost their seats. Four states passed marriage equality ballot measures. Insanely theocratic social agendas were one of the biggest losers in the election, Alabama’s Roy Moore excepted.

I’m not convinced that crap couldn’t resurface in the future but the younger generation seems less likely to tolerate Gallagher’s kind of hate and stupid.

davidhart

F@7@ “Right. So people voted for Obama instead, because Mitt isn’t anti-gay enough?”

I think she thinks the logic goes ‘Okay, I have to choose between Obama, who isn’t a totalitarian anti-gay extremist, and Romney, who isn’t a totalitarian anti-gay extremist. Since I’m only interested in voting for a totalitarian anti-gay extremist, I don’t think I’ll bother voting in this election’…

i.e. compared with the level of anti-gay policies she would like, Obama and Romney were so close on those issues as to be indistinguishable.

The problem for nuts like Gallagher is that she truly believes that there is this massive majority of truly conservative Americans who are just waiting for a knight in batshit armor to come along and they’ll all fall to their knees and *cough* vote for them. The reality is that self identified conservatives have been coming out and voting:

2008: 34%

2012: 35%

Religious affiliation numbers have remained largely the same in ’04, ’08, and ’12

Party ID (R):

2008: 32%

2012: 32%

Republican vote:

2008: 59,950,323

2012: 58,649,089

So we have about a 1.3 million vote difference between 2008 and 2012 for the Republicans, that difference wouldn’t have been enough to decide the election. It actually appears that far more Obama supporters didn’t vote in ’12 than did in ’08:

2008: 69,499,428

2012: 61,937,581

Now, in 2004 Bush garnered 62,040,610 votes, and that would have been enough to defeat Obama in 2012 (and probably spark one hell of a recount); of course according to exit polls that total included about 3 million Democrats (who needed to have their heads examined).

Ms. Gallagher’s army of true conservatives doesn’t exist. But, I do support her idea that they create their own party and talk about how much they love hating others.

hunter

The Republican establishment didn’t emphasize the social issues because they realized, quite rightly, that they are not winners at this point, and for most voters, they’re way down on the list of what we need to deal with, regardless of the fact that for Gallagher and others who make their living off of “morality,” they’re the first priority: Gallagher’s not mainstream and never was.

Oh, and MikeMa: they won’t quit. They have a higher calling, and it doesn’t allow for accepting “the will of the people” when it goes against your agenda. Protect Marriage Maine is already making noise about putting another referendum on the ballot in 2014, at which time they will lose again. They’ll keep coming back until the money dries up, and with the RC and LDS churches as their major backers, that will be awhile.

otrame

Glen Beck has been hint, fairly subtly for him, that he would be available to lead a third party. It’s pretty funny. I keep thinking, “Oh, please don’t throw me in that briar patch!”

MikeMa

The economy should have been enough to get Romney elected. There are lots of reasons why it didn’t. Theocratic social policy was one.

@hunter,

Yeah, they will keep coming back but even if they win a few more battles, the war is lost. The future rests with tolerance and equality. This pattern repeats over and over but the haters and bigots never learn.

raven

Yeah, they will keep coming back but even if they win a few more battles, the war is lost. The future rests with tolerance and equality.

The anti-gay bigotry and hate seems to be on its way out.

It was always a stupid issue anyway.

1. Are there gay people living on my road?

Sure. It’s a long road.

2. Are they married? Who knows, who cares? It’s none of my business and doesn’t effect me in any way.

The fundie xians just need someone to hate, the basis of their cults.

No Hate = No fundie xianity.

They will just have to find some other groups to hate. Not hating isn’t an option. Democrats, scientists, atheists, Moslems, women, nonwhites etc.. So many groups to hate, so little time.

dogmeat

The economy should have been enough to get Romney elected. There are lots of reasons why it didn’t. Theocratic social policy was one.

Actually Mike, the economy favored Obama. The general economic indicators, despite the Republican arguments to the contrary, are positive ones. Add to that, our foreign affairs situation is generally positive as well. It’s why the election being as close as it was is rather disturbing and had a lot more to do with the vilification of a rather middle of the road president into some sort of left-wing lunatic “other” *cough* black guy *cough*.

The Republicans could see that they were winning the “THE ECONOMY IS COLLAPSING!!!!eleventy!!!1!!!” argument despite it being a false one. That’s why they tried to stay away from social issues while at the same time trying to do the “nudge, nudge – wink, wink” game with social issues to the “in crowd.” Again, that Mitt came so close to winning in a race that never should have been that close is somewhat disturbing.

raven

The general economic indicators, despite the Republican arguments to the contrary, are positive ones.

Just barely. Unemployment is still high at almost 9% and we are barely moving.

Bill Clinton. It’s the economy, stupid.

IMO, Obama should really have focused more on this. It’s just a fact that economics underlies everything. Clinton walked his talk and had a successful two terms and left us with a budget surplus. Pea brain Bush promptly turned that around.

OTOH, he did a lot right and it’s not obvious he could have done more. He is president, not the genie of the economy. The US economy doesn’t respond well to commands. In fact, it doesn’t respond at all.

tbp1

@11: Your words to Cthulhu’s ears.

criticaldragon1177

Ed Brayton,

Off course in order to think like this, she has to ignore the fact that Obama actually openly supported gay rights and abortion rights. You’d think if she were correct Obama still would have lost.

At the rate things are going, there’s going to come a time when the republican party has to ignore people like her, just to stand a chance of getting their nominees into office.

andrewjohnston

Uh, “post-mortem”, Ed? That article was posted on the 4th. Gallagher was predicting that a Romney victory would spell the end of social conservatives.

Her actual follow-up is here. She actually blames Romney’s fundraising disadvantage and the GOP’s alienation of Latino voters. Of course, she thinks the Hispanic vote can be won with social issues.

abb3w

Whichever you look at as the post-mortem, she looks to be another case of the GOP ignoring the reality indicated by the polling data. The early results from the Pew Forum indicate that white evangelicals made up the same fraction of the electorate as in 2008. While I doubt his numbers, evangelical Ralph Reed claims it was even higher, and more pro-GOP than ever.

Yet… they lost.

Similarly, she blames the outcome on Gay Marriage Amendments on the spending difference, rather than on the underlying, ongoing, and massive shift in Americans’ attitudes on the question shown by the polling.

I suspect her hopes in appealing more to Hispanics may be another part of it, via the simplification in their heads of Hispanic=Catholic=Pro-life=GOP, when Hispanic Catholics are actually quite strongly pro-choice in some cases… particularly rape.

The GOP appear still unwilling to face the cold harsh numbers from polling the electorate. Their Elephant is becoming an Ostrich.

magistramarla

I have a question for Ed or anyone else.

For amusement, I like to read the comments in the online editorial section of the San Antonio News. Some of the tea party faithful hang out there. Today, one of them was crowing that impeachment proceedings are already in the works and predicted that President Obama and VP Biden would be gone by the end of the year and that John Boehner (gasp!) would be the temporary president by January. He claimed that a NY Times article said that Obama’s “Asian Victory Tour” had already been postponed.

I combed the NY Times, and found not a thing about the President’s planned trip to Asia. Does anyone know where these wingnuts are getting their information (other their own fevered brains)? How can they refer to a fairly reputable site like the NYT, and not know that people might actually check?

If anyone can find this so-called article, please let me know!

MikeMa

@dogmeat

I recognize indications of an improving economy but it took longer than Obama promised (one prevalent ad), unemployment is still too high (another ad), higher taxes on the rich are against god’s will (my reading too much into other ads) and so on.

Obama said we were on the right track and the recovery was happening.

From what I saw and heard from my conservative friends was Romney if we want to recover, Obama will cause another recession.

From my progressive friends it was all against the GOP for the social suicide they saw from a lot of candidates. And the etch-a-sketch man.

Or we are going to wake up like Europe with no political vehicle for a voice.

Yeah, and?

@ magistramarla, President Obama is going to Burma aka Myanmar this month.

dogmeat

Unemployment is still high at almost 9% and we are barely moving.

Actually 7.9%, nearly 8% not nearly 9%. Growth has been averaging 2.2% in ’12, not great, but better than the negative 4% it was averaging in ’09. Consumer confidence was up in October, the fourth straight month.

As I said, not great, but better. Much like it was better for Reagan in ’84.

———

Some of the tea party faithful hang out there. Today, one of them was crowing that impeachment proceedings are already in the works and predicted that President Obama and VP Biden would be gone by the end of the year and that John Boehner (gasp!) would be the temporary president by January

Barring some bizarre major event, which seems highly unlikely given that Obama ran for reelection (think Johnson in ’68), I would give this precisely zero chance of happening. While the Republicans have enough votes in the House to impeach Obama, they don’t have the votes in the Senate necessary to remove him from office.

———-

From what I saw and heard from my conservative friends was Romney if we want to recover, Obama will cause another recession.

Hence my mentioning that the Republicans were desperate to portray the economy in a shambles, etc. It’s not great, see above, but it is far stronger than they were willing to admit.

martinc

otrame at 14 said:

“Oh, please don’t throw me in that briar patch!”

… about a Glenn Beck-led third party.

I know that sounds good. But I was permanently cured of briarpatchism when I was saying in 2000 “please pick that moron GWBush as the Republican candidate … with someone that stupid up for election, the Dems are a shoo-in!”

martinc

I hope I don’t run into a mindless chant of “USA! USA! USA!” when I say that we foreigners (Australia here) look at America’s politicized electoral bodies and are astonished at how patently open to corruption they are. (Let me temper adverse reaction by saying there’s a bunch of things where I think America’s politics is world’s best practice: separation of church and state, codified Bill of Rights/Constitution etc.).

Australia has an Electoral Commission. It’s part of the Public Service. It controls everything to do with any election. Any attempt by politicians to politicize it would be met with extreme disapproval from the electorate.

magistramarla, It’s obvious that someone’s cousin’s brother’s uncle posted in Facebook that the NYT said the Asian tour was cancelled. And no good wingnut is actually going to read it to confirm because visiting the NYT site could infect them with commie/Kenyan/Muslim/gay cooties.

Boy, it’s a good thing that I’m not drinking anything right now. Scratch one monitor from the spit-take if I was.

Seriously? Romney canned a national security advisor earlier in the year because he was gay and Bryan Fischer (who else?) Said So. If I ever find out what drugs Gallagher takes in order to write these deep thoughs of hers, remind me to never, ever go near them.